Targeting, abilities, all that jazz.

Added enemies and some basic combat. Also added a timeline editor. This lets me do a bunch of things that are helpful when designing new sets of waves, like seeing when enemies spawn, adding new enemy spawns by clicking, jumping around in the game timeline, etc. The totems (fire at enemies) and mushrooms (heal you and give you "mana") are working too.

Doing another game jam so didn't make huge progress, but I fixed a bug and started on the healthbar UI.

Refactored all the things.

Added smooth texture transitions, which lets us supply two textures and an alpha channel to blend them with. It should make the environment more interesting. Also did the necessary work to support arbitrary resolutions and fullscreen mode, so there's that. Also added the capability to group things in the editor, which is going to be helpful as we add more properties to edit.

There was also a cool improvement to the editor: in the event that you put in a bad value (like the string 'SUPERFAST' for speed), it will revert it back to the original instead of crashing the whole game. It does this by immediately running the update loop inside a pcall with your supplied input. If the pcall barfs then it reverts the value you entered and flashes red.

On the gameplay side of things started on the shapeshifting ability. Mostly just getting the cooldowns/ability system set up, importing all of the minion animations, and making a simple UI for it. More to come on this later.

Also been violating a bit of the FRP stuff recently so I'll try to get that cleaned up and more organized over the next few days.

Finally got around to putting in some placeholder art. Also changed the walk animation into something more limpy and added a stop animation. The stop animation makes things feel a lot better! Also added collision to objects. Basically objects push each other out of the way and gradually return back to their original position.

Made a small panel that allows me to dynamically edit properties of objects in the game. It's pretty simple right now but it makes fiddling with numbers a lot easier. Either way it should come in handy.

Ported over some of the old UI code to the new engine. The plan is to use this to make a small interface to edit levels or dynamically change the properties of objects during runtime.

Set up a system for animations and sound. Made the movement a lot more smooth, added a walk animation, and footstep sounds.

Progress on the new FRP stuff. Things are now organized into components that bind and unbind observable subscriptions to love2d events when they are created or destroyed. Additionally, each component has a 'state' variable which is an observable representing all of its state that changes over time and a 'props' variable which is just static data that doesn't change (somewhat inspired by the ReactJS framework). This is cool for a few reasons:

• It lets us do functional programming on love events, which makes processing keyboard and mouse input really nice.
• It lets us do some neat stuff related to object states. For example, a pattern we frequently use to render objects is to interpolate between its position in the previous frame and its current position to get a smooth transition. Normally we could set up two variables, one for the current position and another for the previous position, set the previous to equal the current at the beginning of the frame, and perform our updates. Using our new system we can express this more elegantly by just saying `object.state:pluck('position'):window(2)`, which will give us the position at the previous frame and the next frame without having to deal with any extra variables.
• It also lets us better reason about values that change and values that do not change. This may come in handy later on, we'll see.

Worked on some totem art, we'll have different skins for all of the different totems in game.

Mostly design work and some boilerplate code, but at least it was something. Also drew a snazzy totem.

Did a bunch of sloppy prototyping for an MVP. Did some work to allow multiple people to play the game at once, each with their own controller. This should pave the way for local co-op. It also allows people to control our individual minions which is pretty neat. Another change I made was to heavily alter the perspective of the map to increase its depth, so now you can move up/down/left/right instead of just left/right. Also added a system for buildings and added a totem building that shoots nearby enemies.

Going to flesh all of this out more and see what's fun and what isn't.

Since we are adding depth to the game allowing for movement toward and away from the screen/camera rather than just side to side I need to adjust a lot of the art. We need to see all our characters from the back when they are walking away from the screen so I made the back perspective art today.

Finished this effect animation and tried it out for Muju's blink ability but I'm not sold on it yet. It's supposed to be him disappearing into a cloud of smoke but since the blink is instant and moves him sideways I think I'm going to try creating an effect that has more of a horizontal motion like a dash.

Worked on an effect animation today, something I don't have a lot of experience in but I'm giving it a try. It's far from done, but I'm finished working on it for today. I'll clean it up, add more frames to complete the animation, and we will probably add particles and what not.

Added a system for giving Muju abilities. The idea is to flesh this out with various abilities and upgrades for the abilities in the future. Added a Blink ability to test things out with, it's pretty fun.

We made an inventory system for collecting shruju in game, started a tumblr blog (mujucru.tumblr.com) to keep track of our progress and post cool art stuff, and we setup a GIF workflow. I'm still working on tweaking some variables to get a better quality gif, but this example of our world map is what I'm working with right now. Any tips or recommendations on software are welcome, currently I'm using Mac OSX -- Quicktime to record and ffmpeg to convert to gif.

Today there was a lot of brainstorming on how to improve the game. Came up with a list of ideas and began implementing some of them. The game is already much more fast paced and action packed, so we will continue moving forward with things and hope for the best!

We finished our game! http://mujucru.itch.io/muju-juju Give it a go if you have the chance. Ahhhh this is crazy!